Photo: Joi Ito, CC-BY-2.0
Mediaoriente gave this report, and the Free Bassel Safadi Facebook page has also been active on Saturday, though details have been sketchy.
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FOSS Week in Review
Mea culpa: I went to bed last night thinking it was Wednesday, woke up today thinking it was Thursday, went along with my usual Thursday work plan (which differs little from any other weekday) until Christine Hall emailed me and asked, “Where’s the wrap?”
Oops. With apologies and with a brand new calendar in hand, here’s the weekly wrap-up.
Photo by Jamie Pham)
Her name is Natalia and she doesn’t have a clue about what is in store for her tomorrow. Natalia started high school this year. She’s not only an honor roll student, she’s musically gifted as well. Natalia studies the piano, tenor sax and now the cello. She was inspired by the group “Two Cellos” and she begged her mom to buy her a cello. Well, that’s not possible in her home with their current income. Natalia’s mom works two jobs to make it and the only instrument she has at home is an old tenor sax that she found in a pawn shop. However, an uncle did respond and he is buying her a cello at the end of October.
Natalia is able to practice piano four hours a week. Two hours at her school, another hour at a local community-sponsored recreation center and one hour at the local library. That library has several music rooms. Her mom takes her to these various places when she returns from work each evening. Natalia’s mom doesn’t have much time to herself, she’s a single parent who wants nothing more than for her child to succeed.
Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue
Well, here we are, only three weeks away from the third annual All Things Open (ATO) conference, slated to be held in Raleigh on October 19 and 20. ATO is all about the enterprise and is targeted at those who earn their livings in open source tech, be they coders, system administrators or front office folk.
For the non-enterprise FOSS user, it may seem from a quick glance that ATO has little to offer, but that’s not the case. Buried between all the technically focused talks for devs and sysadmins is a plethora of great workshops for those who’s interest in FOSS doesn’t necessarily include writing code or keeping a server or two operating. In other words, it’s not just about designing GUIs or methods for optimizing databases for intensive cloud use.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
FOSS Week in Review
Highlighting the week’s activities in the FOSS realm is, say it with me, money. You know, the thing that we all want but that most of us never have enough of. Some have it and some need it — making it a good thing we’re about to tell you who is who with this weekend’s wrap up.
Open FOSS Training Indiegogo Campaign: Back home again in Indiana — Martinsville, Indiana, to be exact — Matthew Williams has taken the baton and is running with it when it comes to training folks in the use of free/open source software, or what we lovingly refer to as FOSS.
Time to saddle up the rant stallion and take him out of the stable: This comes up from time to time on social media — as it did again several days ago — and it’s really about time it stops.
Dennis Ritchie and Steve Jobs died pretty close to each other, time-wise. That may sound like the start of a joke — “Dennis Ritchie and Steve Jobs meet at the pearly gates, and…” — but we’re not going there today. Many people are under the impression that while Steve Jobs got all the attention as the “messiah of computing” when he died, Dennis Ritchie was completely ignored.
FOSS Week in Review
First things first: If you noticed the abscence of the clockwork-like timing of each of FOSS Force’s articles this week, it’s because our editor-in-chief Christine Hall lost a battle with gravity involving a staircase and spent some time recovering from a good banging-up. When you get a chance, wish her a speedy recovery.
Speaking of things as certain as gravity…
FSF Turns 30: Mark your calendars for Oct. 3. The Free Software Foundation — you know, the guys and gals who continue to tirelessly advocate for “free-as-in-freedom-and-beer” technology — is gearing up for its 30th birthday party. The party will feature an address by FSF founder and president Richard Stallman. You can learn more about the event on the celebration page and the RSVP form is open. If you so desire to use a hashtag on social media (though the FSF has this caveat about social media), knock yourself out with #FSF30.
It wasn’t that long ago that being a Linux or FOSS user in Panama was a lonely experience. Like everywhere else, the country was an established Microsoft camp and you either bought proprietary software — Windows, Office and the like — or pirated what you needed. There were no other options.
Back in the days when the PC and the Internet were starting to change how work is done in Latin America, I was a project manager in small business finance. Even though I’m an industrial engineer by training, because I’m tech oriented I was asked questions about network security, wireless, storage, what sort of program we could use at the office…stuff like that. My conclusion? We were either going to have to buy expensive software licenses and new hardware or find another way.
But as I said, life was pretty lonely for a FOSS user back then.
Juan Courville resides in Panama City, Panama, where he lives with his wife of twenty years. When he’s not riding his bicycle or working with Linux and FOSS, he’s publishing the Spanish language websites Linux para Las Masas and Mccpanama.
FOSS Week in Review
Back to school, back to work, back to just about everything else free and open source this week: The temperatures could be a little cooler in California, but there’s a modicum of cool to go with the heat.
Like the following items in this week’s wrap…
Tipping the Scales for Linux: Sean Michael Kerner over at Datamation wrote an article accompanying a video interview with Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin, who says, among other things, why the foundation is just going to keep growing.
It’s somewhat amazing how much important news doesn’t reach us via the mainstream press. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t see photos or…